Native American Warriors

John Trudell - A Native American Warrior

Excerpts from John Trudell's book

"Stickman" (ISBN 0-9625119-8-6)

Of all the Native American Warriors, John Trudell is a consummate warrior with a message we all need to hear.

"We are a spirit, we are a natural part of the earth, and all of our ancestors, all of our relations who have gone to the spirit world, they are here with us. That's power. They will help us. They will help us to see if we are willing to look. We are not separated from them because there's no place to go -- we stay here. This is our place: the earth. This is our mother: we will not go away from our mother.

"And no matter what they ever do to us, no matter how they ever strike at us, we must never become reactionary. The one thing that has always bothered me about revolution, every time I have seen the revolutionary, is they have reacted out of hatred for the oppressor. We must do this for the love of our people.

No matter what they ever do to us, we must always act for the love of our people and the earth. We must not react out of hatred against those who have no sense."

- Trudell - Black Hills Survival gathering, 1980

POWER

"We must not become confused and deceived by their illusions. There is no such thing as military power; there is only military terrorism. There is no such thing as economic power; there is only economic exploitation. That is all that it is. They try to program our minds and fool us with these illusions so that we will believe that they hold the power in their hands but they do not.

All they know is how to act in a repressive, brutal way...Power...we are a natural part of the earth. We are an extension of the earth, we are not separate from it. We are a part of it. The earth is our mother. The earth is a spirit and we are an extension of that spirit. We are spirit. We are power. They want us to believe that we have to believe in them and depend upon them and we have to consume these consumer identities and these religious identities and these political identities and these racial identities. They want to separate us from our power. They want to separate us from who we are.

GENOCIDE

Genocide is just an intellectual way of saying: murder, because we live in a so-called civilized industrialized world, and because this world is allegedly civilized and allegedly has laws, they can't go out and call an act of murder "murder" anymore, so they call it genocide to throw another illusion in our eyes."

RESISTANCE

"We want to be free of a value system that is being imposed on us. We do not want to participate in that value system. We don't want to change that value system. We want to remove it from our lives forever.

"We must never underestimate our enemy. Our enemy is committed against us twenty-four hours a day. They use one hundred percent of their effort to maintain their materialistic status quo. One hundred percent of their effort goes into deceiving us and manipulating us against each other. We have to devote our lives, we have to make our commitment, we have to follow a way of life that says we are going to resist that forever ... a resistance: something that we can pass on as strength to the coming generations."

"A resistance where organizational egos don't get in the way. A resistance where individual egos do not get in the way. A resistance where the infiltrators and the provocateurs and the liars and the betrayers and the traitors, they do not get in the way ... a resistance of consciousness. This is our obligation to the earth. And only by fulfilling our obligation to the earth can we fulfill our obligations to the people.

"We must go beyond the arrogance of human rights. We must go beyond the ignorance of civil rights. We must step into the reality of natural rights because all of the natural world has a right to existence and we are only a small part of it. There can be no trade-off."